will, provided that will had been sufficiently trained? He felt
pleasantly tired from the walk of the afternoon; he thought that he
would go up to his rooms for a while, perhaps write a personal letter or
two, afterward come down again for a game of cards. He stood up; the
long double lines of men at the table rose with him, as a unit, at
attention. The Maimed Man looked at them for a prolonged second, his
heart stirred with pride; then he wheeled about and departed.

"In his workroom above, two secretaries were writing at a table under
the rays of a green-shaded lamp. They jumped to their feet as he
entered, but he waved them aside.

"'I shall return in a moment,' he said. 'First I wish to finish my
cigar.'

"He opened the glass door onto the balcony, but, as it was cool, he
stepped back and asked for his military cloak. When this was adjusted,
he stepped once more into the moonlight.... And then, suddenly, there
was no moonlight at all, or just the faintest glimmer of it, like light
seen through milky water. Instead, he had stepped into a swirling vapor
that in an instant lost him completely from the door he had just left; a
maelstrom of fog, that choked him, half blinded him, twisted about him
like wet, coiling ropes, and in a dreadful moment he saw that through
the fog were thrust out toward him arms of a famine thinness, the
extended fingers of which groped at his throat, were obliterated by the
fog, groped once more with a searching intentness.

"'God!' said The Maimed Man. 'God!'--and fought drunkenly for the wall
behind him. His hands touched nothing. He did not even know in which
direction the wall lay. He dreaded to move, for it seemed as if there
was no longer a railing to save him from falling. There was no solidity
anywhere. The world had become a thing of hideous flux, unstable as when
first it was made. Gelid fingers, farther reaching than the rest,
touched the back of his neck. He gave a hoarse, strangled cry and reeled
forward, and fell across the balustrade that came up out of the mist to
meet him. And slowly the mist retreated; down from the balcony and
across the open place beneath. A narrow line of dew-brightened grass
appeared and grew wider. The tops of the trees began to show. But The
Maimed Man could not take his eyes off the mist, for it seemed to him
that the open place was filled with the despairing arms of women and of
children, and that through the shifting whiteness gleamed the whiten